What's New in Rust's "Devblog 72" Update

Devblog 72 shipped in August 2015 and came with something Facepunch had never done before: a blueprint wipe. Monthly server wipes were routine, but stored blueprints had always survived. This time they didn't, because the entire way you acquire blueprints was being rebuilt around a fragment system. The same patch rebuilt the Sphere Tank into a real monument, added public utilities for solo players, and fixed an explosion bug that had quietly been making rockets far stronger than designed.

The Blueprint Fragment System

Maurino was explicit that this is a work in progress, and that it currently sits on top of the existing blueprint and item loot drops rather than replacing them.

The mechanic: anything you loot from barrels or crates has a fairly high chance of dropping a Blueprint Fragment, and the crappier the loot found, the higher the chance of fragments. Collect enough and you can redeem them for a random common blueprint - or keep saving and upgrade to a higher tier part for a better result. There are four tiers:

• Blueprint Fragment - common blueprint.
• Blueprint Page - uncommon blueprint.
• Blueprint Book - rare blueprint.
• Blueprint Library - very rare blueprint.

Fragments can also be used at a research table to increase research success odds up to 100%.

The goal is twofold. First, mitigating the pure RNG of blueprint hunting by giving you the option to save toward something better rather than praying the one-in-250 barrel contains the AK47 you want. Second, letting you find the actual item and spend saved fragments to guarantee you get it. If it works out, the plan was to remove full blueprint drops entirely and have real items drop more frequently instead.

The wipe explanation was straightforward: monthly wipes let Facepunch change internal things like item names and data storage formats that otherwise couldn't move, and this rework needed the blueprints gone too.

Explosion Line of Sight and Rocket Balance

Maurino found what he called a long standing, super derpy bug. Rockets and explosives were treating themselves as being "in the way" when checking line of sight to their targets, which broke the checks entirely.

With line of sight checks properly reimplemented, rockets are far less overpowered - they now mostly damage the building block they hit rather than everything within their radius. Splash damage radius was also lowered from 5 to 3.8.

Public Utilities for Solo Players

After the High Quality Metal change, complaints came in that solo play had become too hard. Maurino held that the impact was vastly overstated but softened the curve anyway by placing public utilities around the map:

• A public quarry producing HQM at warehouses.
• Satellite Dish gets a Research Table and Repair Bench.
• Airfield gets a Research Table, Small Furnace and Crude Oil Barrels.
• Lighthouse gets barrels in and around it.

Crucially, these aren't a replacement for your own infrastructure: public utilities yield roughly 30-50% of what even the worst player-built quarry or pumpjack produces, so building your own remains clearly better.

The other half of this change was less popular: you can no longer build around Monuments or Radtowns. The reasoning was that the grief caused to everyone else on the server outweighed the fun a group of five was having.

The Sphere Monument

Vince's rebuilt Sphere Monument replaced the grainy old sphere tank. Underneath it there are oil barrels and public refineries, with good loot throughout and above it. There are many entrances and exits, and reaching the top takes some parkour. Alex Rehberg gave it a set of ambient sounds and experimented with reverb on sounds originating inside, noting that Unity's reverb does a decent job with indoor spaces - a pleasant change from trying to make it work for outdoor gunshots.

Unloading Ammo and AK Recoil

A long overdue Legacy feature returned: you can select a weapon and unload its ammunition back into your inventory. The nice side effect is that finding a loaded gun also gives you a few chances to research the ammunition it came with.

The AK47 was judged unbalanced after extensive play, a conclusion the new metrics data on deaths backed up. Recoil was increased to bring it more in line with Legacy's M4, reducing its spray-and-pray effectiveness, with more changes expected.

Leather

All animals except chickens now give leather along with 50% of their previous cloth value. Leather is required for roadsign body and leg armour, metal plate body and head armour, and all hide clothing types - giving hunting a purpose beyond food and turning cloth-only armour crafting into a two-resource problem.

Load Times, Sound and Save Performance

Garry took three passes at performance. Load times had been getting steadily worse, mainly since the switch to the bundles system, and a batch of changes went in to address that.

For sound, everything had been shipped Ogg compressed, which keeps file sizes down but means decompression before playback - causing hitches when loading items and inflating load times. Smaller sounds now ship uncompressed, dramatically cutting their load time, while longer sounds like ambience and music stay Ogg but are streamed rather than decompressed wholesale into memory at startup.

For saves, the regular server save could take up to 5 seconds on some servers, freezing the entire server for that period. The optimisation makes it use the entity's cached save buffer, which should make a big difference, with a review planned a couple of weeks later.

Skin Chooser

Garry closed the loop on the pay-to-win concern from the previous devblogs. Clothing skins from your Steam Inventory previously worked whether or not you owned the original item. They're now purely skins - you need to have unlocked the blueprint for the item, and when you craft it you choose which skin to apply. The Workshop SDK remained on Steam under the tools section, with more skinnable items being added continuously.

Procgen10

The tenth iteration of procedural map generation went live, headlined by support for monuments that can be interacted with - the technical basis for the public utilities above. Landscape changes: vastly improved lakes, more natural forest shapes, icebergs back in the Arctic biome, and tweaks making the Arid biome easier to identify.

• More accurate terrain normal calculation, fixing various minor issues.
• Height map memory usage reduced by 50%.
• Tweaked field rock assets and distribution.
• Added noise to terrain around all monuments and radtowns.
• Added building topology to manually block tree placement around certain monument buildings.
• Added MonumentInfo to all monuments, potentially useful for mods.
• Palms only spawn on arid beaches; different beachside trees added to temperate beaches.
• Minor vegetation performance improvements and physics optimisations for roads and rivers.
• Icesheets are visible from further away and more spread out.

Rock Exploit, Part Two

One more route into rocks survived the previous week's fix - placing a sleeping bag inside one. That's now fixed, and since this was a wipe week, all existing rock-bound sleeping bags disappeared with it. The standing request to report any further method remained.

Player Aiming Rework

Gooseman completely reworked how player aiming is displayed. The old approach used Unity's built-in IK system, which had major limitations: the spine wouldn't bend naturally, leaving the player looking like Gumby, and getting the weapon to point in the direction the player was actually aiming was a fight. In comparison footage, the red line showing true point of aim visibly didn't line up with the weapon.

The new system uses animation poses and layering to compute a more accurate up/down aim representation. The spine bends far more naturally and the weapon points much closer to where the player is actually aiming. A few bugs remained to iron out. He was also building a new beartrap animation, with Helk requesting one that keeps the player upright.

Art and Concepts

Xavier was nearly finished integrating female versions of all existing clothing - meaning far fewer ugly seams and weird gaps for female characters - and started on a goofy-looking balaclava that will support multiple skins like the shirts and jackets, with bandannas planned next, possibly in face and head variants.

Vince built the large refinery, the same idea as the small one but giving access to different fuel types, working like a real fractionating tower where the higher you go the finer the yield. It's the tallest deployable in the game to date, so as well as being a crafting station it makes an excellent watchtower - though the gameplay loop wasn't implemented yet. He also flagged that his large-deployable foundations, having gone from straight to a quickly patched-on ramp for terrain, currently look terrible and needed Rustifying.

Howie started planning horse saddles, given how eager everyone was to ride horses, and started looking at backpacks because backpacks look cool. Megan finished another round of flamethrower iterations and landed on a final design, with bed concepts still in progress.

Alex Rehberg did a first pass at sounds for all the newer melee weapons - Bone Club, Sword, Two-Handed Sword, Two-Handed Cleaver, Machete and Two-Handed Mace - and lined up polish work on explosions, horse footsteps, and more accurate foliage rustle triggers with different sounds per plant.

Craig started cleaning up item descriptions, mostly ensuring they had full stops, with a plan to drop most of the placeholder snark and make them genuinely useful while staying interesting. Tom and Paul were both out ill - tonsillitis in Tom's case, with Paul concluding that art people are obviously weak.

Everything Else

• Humans now drop 1 fat plus 1 per 3 minutes alive, fixing the ability to farm yourself for fat.
• Map is now a default blueprint; crossbow zoom increased.
• Pumpjack takes longer to produce crude oil, and crude oil yields less low grade fuel per unit.
• Low grade fuel crafting sessions yield 3 units instead of 7, while furnaces are cheaper in low grade fuel terms.
• Small Wood Box storage doubled from 6 to 12 slots.
• Added trash piles around the map - mostly food, sometimes BP fragments.
• Items show protection values in the inventory and details when hovered.
• Unified item shortnames and prefab names internally.
• Fixed a server NRE that previously only cleared on restart, and cargo plane networking its position too often.
• Fixed multiple doors being placed in one doorway, and doors being unplaceable if deployables sat behind their frame.
• Fixed planted corn and pumpkins disappearing after every server restart.
• Fixed players getting stuck in the falling state, crouch jumping issues, and door lock colliders colliding with player movement (fixing a door exploit).
• Added the input.autocrouch convar for legacy-style auto crouching.
• Fixed several UI issues: item icons getting stuck selected, the selection and blueprint panels not always showing, and needing to click the blueprint button twice.
• Fixed the active weapon not always updating for other players.
• Sign and map image storage moved to a SQLite database, with the old folder deleted.

On the anti-cheat side, EasyAntiCheat confirmed a Windows 7 problem where the game refuses to close and the computer can't shut down, with a solution released that should apply automatically. Andre's priorities for the following week were fixing the major issues with animals and adding proper step detection to player movement - while Garry headed off on another two-week holiday, noting that this is how Notch made Minecraft and it worked out fine.